Kibbles 'n' Bits: Bill Watterson SPEAKS

§ Bill Watterson TALKS—along with Trudeau, Johnston and more—about their former editor Lee Salem, who is leaving his editorial job at the Universal syndicate for a more business-oriented one.

“In the strips Universal launched, the writing was paramount, and Lee had a great eye for lively writers and a real understanding of what makes a comic strip work,” Watterson tells Comic Riffs. LEE SALEM: After 38 years as part of Universal Uclick’s editorial department, the executive transitions from that side of the business. (CAVNA / The Washington Post ). “Lee has a smart sense of humor and he understands good comic timing,” Johnston tells us. “He can be funny and fun to be with, but he can also be a tough opponent if need be.” And Trudeau tells Comic Riffs: “I’ve depended on Lee’s friendship, guidance, protection and occasional interventions for decades, and I have no intention of giving all that up.”

§ David Alan Doane has relaunched Comic Book Galaxy as a daily link site. As oft-relaunched as the site has been, this is a good iteration of it.

ITEM! I’ve been searching for some all-ages superhero material to fill the void left behind by the cancellation of Batman: The Brave and The Bold, and so far it looks like the best replacement is… back issues of Batman: The Brave and The Bold. DC’s dedicated kids comic book app DC Nation is a great place to find all-ages material at fair prices. Most of the older comics are only $0.99, which feels cheap given the prices for other digital comics. So far the app has offerings from most of the Adventures-style books (except for Justice League Adventures or Justice League Unlimited). As for Batman: The Brave and The Bold, so far there are only 20 comics from the first volume on the DC Nation app, but Comixology has all 22 issues. The two issues missing from the DC Nation app are #8 and #20, which I’d been wanting to read since it features Batman teaming up with Big Barda to rescue Mister Miracle.

There’s also a post by cartoonist and screenwriter Bruce Eric Kaplan who wrote the episode in question. Kaplan also defends the cartoon shown below as funny, while I agree with a poster in the comments that it is badly executed:

The amount of lovingly executed action in the cartoon makes the punchline about lack of perspective hard to grasp. Plus the kid is hard to make out—I thought it was a little abstract New Yorker pooch at first.

Heidi MacDonald is an award-winning editor/journalist with 20 years. An editor at Disney and DC Comics, she edited such titles as The Lion King, Scooby Doo, Swamp Thing, and Y: The Last Man. She cohosts Publishers Weekly’s graphic novel podcast More to Come.

1 COMMENT

Actually, I’ll complain about the inaccurately named Best American Comics for the same reason I’ve complained about it in years past. It is in no way reflective of American comics, just those that fall into the alternative slash artsy-fartsy area favored by the editors and in which they themselves generally work. The mainstream is almost completely ignored, a bias that continues year after year.

The stories themselves may be wonderful, though I usually find many of them far less than wonderful, but they don’t reflect all the excellent comics out there.

When I read and review the contents, I will do so on their own merits. But I’ll also comment on the anthology’s unwillingness to recognize the merits of work outside the editors’ area of interest.

Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Archie, IDW, Boom, Image, Amelia Rules (which is better than most of the stuff in previous “Best” volumes), Love and Capes, Usagi Yojimbo, and lots of other comics and publishers I could list if I had the time to take a spin through the Previews catalog and those of other non-comics publishers. Not to mention, though I guess I’m about to do that, newspaper comic strips and webcomics. Good stories can and are being told by all of the above. But the limited mindset of the current editors seem to preclude these receiving fair consideration for inclusion.